Abuse and harassment on the blockchain

When I receive a harassing message on the social networks I use, it tends to be pretty straightforward to just block the user. Most social networks introduce barriers to creating armies of new harassment accounts to cycle through when one is blocked, typically requiring email or phone verification, and using this data along with device data to prop... See more

While blockchain proponents speak about a “future of the web” based around public ledgers, anonymity, and immutability, those of us who have been harassed online look on in horror as obvious vectors for harassment and abuse are overlooked, if not outright touted as features.

“Just use a different anonymous wallet”, people might say. This is much easier in theory than in practice, since funds in a wallet have to come from somewhere, and it’s not difficult to infer what might be happening when your known wallet address suddenly transfers money off to a new, empty wallet. There are certainly ways to successfully and anony... See more

Furthermore, tokens can be “airdropped” to specific addresses, with no consent required by the recipient. Often used as a way to distribute free NFTs for giveaways and other promotional campaigns, there is nothing stopping someone from airdropping NFTs with abusive content—doxing, revenge porn, child sexual abuse imagery, threats, etc.—into someone... See more

In order to responsibly develop new technologies, it is critical to ask “how will this be used for evil?”

One commonly-touted feature of blockchains is their immutability: once data is written to the blockchain, it is there forever.8 While this can have useful applications, such as when storing straightforward transaction records, it is a nightmare when you think about its implications for user-created data, particularly when considered through the len... See more

“How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?” is a form of that question that too often goes unasked, particularly given that the demographics of people who are most at risk for abuse and harassment tend to be underrepresented in the industry. Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs coul... See more

People who keep their cryptocurrency wallet addresses private often do so with good reason: there is very little privacy available once your crypto wallet address is known, because every transaction is publicly visible, and attempts to obscure them often easily unobscured with chain analysis tools. Imagine if, when you Venmo-ed your Tinder date for... See more